The Exception
by happy-days
Summary: Damon drinks and muses about how he is forever doomed to love women who refuse to love him back. Set after events of 3x20.


I own nothing but a Macbook Pro and vague ramblings resembling stories.

The Exception

Too many times, he thought it was real; that what she felt for him was real. The touches, the intense looks of longing, the flirting... it all screamed real to Damon. Then the niggling little bastard on his shoulder would promptly remind him that her love for his brother was still a constant presence in their lives, and his fantasy would fade away to the true reality: she would always have feelings for Stefan.

Stefan, Stefan, Stefan.

The good son. The taller brother. The better man.

Damon swirled his bourbon around the crystal glass and stared intently at the bronze liquid as it glazed the sides. In one movement, he downed the alcohol. He was certain that if he was human, his liver would have given up on him long ago.

Drinking kept him sober... Alcohol kept him sane.

If Damon was forced to spend eternity in a constant state of awareness, he was fairly sure he would kidnap Elena and drag her away from his brother. Keeping her locked in a box under his bed to ensure she would always be his was a horrible, twisted thought... but he couldn't deny that it hadn't crossed his mind.

So Damon drank. He drank to numb the pain of having something he loved so profoundly so close in proximity, yet so unattainably out of his reach.

Damon hated that he loved his little brother, too. He wished that he could be more selfish where Elena was concerned. It was out of character for him to be the bigger man, and he loathed it, but he couldn't bring himself to change that. Not anymore... not with her.

He cursed Stefan and his inherent struggle to come out alright in the end. He was gone. Stefan had left... and now he was back, in both body and mind. Damon couldn't ignore him. His love for his brother would apparently always haunt him. It would be the one thing that could trump his longing for Elena.

Elena...

Damon set down the crystal glass and leant against the mantle. He breathed in heavily and let his tired eyes close.

He thought his love for Katherine had been eternal. The passion he had felt had been both amazing and precarious. Their chemistry was undeniable. Katerina Petrova was his equivalent to Stefan's human blood addiction: dangerous, scintillating, and detrimental to his mental health.

He had loved her, he couldn't deny that either. She had been the first person to accept him - faults and all. Her depraved and selfish ideals rubbed off on him easily; she was the first challenge he refused to back down from.

But now removed from the sex-driven haze, Damon came to realize that she had never truly been his. It had always been about Stefan. Damon was the one being used; the convenient afterthought for Katherine. She had lied to him, and he was so far in denial he was willing to believe her.

There was something pitifully beautiful about unrequited love. And yes, Damon had loved Katherine. He had loved her for one-hundred and forty-five years.

And it took less than a week for that love to turn to rage once he realized that she had never loved him back.

He had lost himself then. His life's sole purpose, driven by his love for a woman who didn't give two shits about him, had been ripped from his outstretched hands. He had been lost... and then he found her.

And his love for Elena eclipsed anything he had felt for Katherine like a mountain to a molehill.

The sincere, selfless person that Elena was, was so perversely opposite from the traits Katherine possessed that Damon had a difficult time grasping and accepting his love for her. For this reason, he was entirely unsure as to when exactly Elena went from being "Stefan's perky girlfriend who looks exactly like Katherine" to "the pure, unadulterated love of his life".

Regardless, he mused, it seemed that he was forever doomed to love women who weren't in love with him.

Annoyed and frustrated, he left the lounge and ascended the staircase into his bedroom. Entering the sprawling bathroom, he turned the shower knob until the water scalded his cold skin.

The life of the undead was lonely. Damon was not the type of person to make friends easily, and they had the unfortunate habit of dying on him once he did. He had thought that Ric was a sure thing. Oh, the irony.

He supposed Elena was his friend. Besides the ludicrous sexual tension and the awkward denial of affections, she remained constant. Damon wasn't used to constant. Up until her, he had preferred spontaneity.

He knelt to sit on the tiled floor of his shower and breathe in the steam. Elena, however, had proved she could be spontaneous... his lips still seared with her proof. He licked them tentatively. The tingling sensation she had left in her wake still hadn't entirely dissipated. He was not entirely disappointed at this.

The one thing that had kept him sane where Elena was concerned was the unknown. Yes, she was perfect on paper, but Damon would envision her kisses as lacking in passion. He told himself that she was reserved, and boring in the sack. He imagined that fucking Elena would be like bedding a starfish.

His sanity-saving illusions were brutally shattered the second her lips crashed onto his in the dingy hallway of that motel. The lights had flickered, the wind had whipped, and his undead heart gave an almighty lurch under the explosive power of her lips. She positively seethed with raw sex-appeal and passion on a level that Damon never fathomed she possessed. He now knew what he had feared all along: he was completely and pathetically in love with his perfect woman.

She was made for him; his salvation. And the stupid girl had her head so far up her ass in denial that it was permanently stuck there.

Elena Gilbert would be the death of him.

He didn't understand how she couldn't see it. It was right there in front of her. Damon was willing to bet his afterlife that that one kiss between them contained more earth-shattering passion than anything she had ever felt with Stefan.

He wanted to (politely) smack some sense into the girl. Moreso now than ever before. Nothing that she had done thus far had agitated him to the extent he felt now. They were supposed to be together.

She was the one thing in his life that he could do right; the one person to finally choose him.

And she couldn't make up her damn mind.


End file.
